From the death of love to the love of death Haunting and fantasizing about the end of sex in Rachilde’s The Tower of Love

Between life drive and death drive, Rachilde's novel La Tour d'amour conveys a paradoxical vision of love. If the relationship to Eros is usually associated with desire to live, here it is synonymous with the desire for necrosis and death. The sea, central figure, syncretizes by itself the Woman and crystallizes as much the fascination as the threat that this one represents in the eyes of the men. Thus, the novel questions the relationship between the sexes in a dialectical movement oscillating between anti-feminism and feminism.